


conversation blackout

by bellmare



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Caught in a Bad Bromance, Community: kh_drabble, Gen, Memories, caught in a rad bromance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-08-24
Packaged: 2017-11-12 19:29:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 577
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellmare/pseuds/bellmare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything will be fine in the end -- it's a mantra he's been repeating to himself for longer than he cares to remember.</p>
            </blockquote>





	conversation blackout

You promised me we would stick together, through thick and thin—because that’s what best friends are for.

 

.

 

“You’ll be all right,” I say as I drag you to the shelter of a broken-down tavern in the godforsaken city of storms. “ _We’ll_ be all right.”

 

I want to believe that, but when you look at me with eyes that reflect my own doubts, when you smile at me with the bitterness that I won’t – that I _can’t_ – allow myself to feel, my resolution falters.

 

“Are you sure?” you say, with a voice as brittle as the broken glass that crunches beneath my soles. “Are you, really?”

 

.

 

“We’re blood brothers, you and I,” you say matter-of-factly, cutting the thin line of red fire across our bony wrists. “Do you know what that means?”

 

My lips are dry, my throat is sandpaper, but I somehow manage to choke the reply out. “Of course I do. Don’t be stupid.”

 

.

 

It’s an unspoken, unwritten promise, but the echoes of our vow keeps me awake at night, pounding through my temples, just like how your blood rushes through my veins.

 

Everything will be fine once we achieve that goal of ours.

 

That’s what I keep telling myself, anyway.

 

.

 

It seems as though time has passed so fast. It seems like only yesterday that we had been hurled headfirst into the city of shadows, two sodden, woebegone boys who were convinced they were going to die.

 

Back then, you were Isa and I was Lea. Everything seemed so certain back then. I had thought nothing would ever change.

 

I was wrong. We all were.

 

For all your stargazing and dabbling in divination, even _you_ didn’t see the end coming. To be fair, nobody did.

 

I guess it was foolish to think things would always stay the way they had always been, constant and unchanging.

 

.

 

It’s been an eternity since we went out on missions together. Today, for the first time in years, we’re alone together, perched atop the Twilight Town clocktower like oversized jackdaws, ignoring the salty-sweet ice-creams which are starting to melt onto our hands.

 

The silence stretches between us, impregnable and cloying. Whatever happened to the easy banter we shared before? This stilted silence seems so strange and alien, but not altogether unfamiliar.

 

Once, you clear your throat, and that single, staccato cough seems almost like a bridge of sound which I could almost cross. Then, the moment passes as suddenly as it came, and you’re gone, vanishing into the blooming gate of darkness which envelops you, leaving alone, with nothing but my memories for company.

 

.

 

When Roxas arrives, it’s almost as though he’s filling in the emptiness left behind by the person who was once my best friend.

 

Can anyone honestly blame me for grasping out desperately for that last fraying connection with Lea?

 

Can anyone blame me for trying to recapture the fleeing traces of who I once was?

 

.

 

Civil conversation has become a rarity with us. We meet in the shadow of a crisis; our plans have been jeopardised, but by this point, I can’t find it in me to care.

 

Not when the person who stands in front of me isn’t the Isa that I knew.

 

“Things are finally right again,” you say calmly, parroting back to me the very same words I had used to reassure you with all those years ago. “Of course we’re better off this way.”

 

But _are_ we, Isa? Are we, really?

**Author's Note:**

> Circa 2010. I really need to stop being so neurotic about tagging with the approximate chronological era. It'll only land me in worlds of pain and also a lot of clutching my head and trying to make my stupid idiosyncratic tagging system make sense. Spiritual successor of [ties that bind, ties that break](http://archiveofourown.org/works/494841) and related to [dichotomy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/493996) and [ashes to ashes](http://archiveofourown.org/works/494857).


End file.
